Many devices used in the computer, telecommunications, electronics and other industries are mounted in sheet metal housings which are in turn mounted in a vertical rack assembly. Rack mounts have long been used in electronics instrumentation applications to mount housings containing various instruments such as voltmeters, signal generators, oscilloscopes, and power supplies. The telecommunications and networking industry often mount switching assemblies and other components in rack mounted housings. Examples of rack mounted housings applications in the home electronics industry include stereo components and home entertainment center audio and video components. In the computer industry computers and computer peripherals including mass storage devices such as tapes, optical disks, CD-ROMs, DVDs are provided in rack mounted sheet metal housings. Sheet metal housings are also used to house peripheral devices such as DVD drives which are fixedly or removable mounted in bays within a larger computer housing.
In rack mounted housings, and some other types of housings as well, an assembly known as a "bezel assembly" or simply "bezel" is attached to the front face of the housing. In some cases the bezel has no function other than to provide a "finished" appearance to the portion of the housing which is visible to users. In other cases the bezel may contain an opening, such as for insertion or removal of media, control knobs or buttons, viewable displays or other functional features. However even with such functional bezels, the appearance of the bezel is usually considered very important to the organization which markets the associated product. In many cases the bezel is the only feature of the product which the end user actually sees.
In many industries one company, generally referred to as an "original equipment manufacturer" or "OEM", manufactures a particular product which it sells to other companies. Each of these other companies subsequently sells the product under its own trademark or brand name, either to distributors or directly to end users. In such cases the company selling to the distributors/end users may require the OEM to provide visual marking that identifies the product with the company selling to distributors/end users. For products sold in housings, this identifying visual marking is often provided by customizing the housing's bezel. However, producing customized bezels for its different customers typically significantly increase an OEM's manufacturing costs. If the OEM simply sells the same identical product to each of its customers it is able to maintain relatively low production costs since the same machinery, tooling and production steps may be used for producing all of the products. If the OEM produces a customized bezel for each of its customers, separate bezel tooling must be created for each customer and, depending upon the bezels, special assembly techniques and/or components may be required as well.
It would be generally desirable to provide a bezel assembly of a type which may be efficiently and inexpensively produced in a plurality of different configurations, each having a unique appearance.
A need exists for a bezel assembly which may be quickly and easily mounted on or removed from an associated housing unit, preferably without using special tooling. Such a bezel assembly would be particularly useful in OEM manufacturing operations where it may be necessary to remove and replace a bezel plates configured for one customer with a bezel plates configured for another customer on relatively short notice. A need also exits for a bezel assembly which enables a bezel plate to be adjusted with respect to adjacent bezel plates or other structure to account for tolerance stacking in housings having multiple attached components, such as for example a housing having bezel plates mounted on drawers which must be aligned with bezel plates mounted on stationary housing structures.